Abstract:The primary aim of this paper is to assess video quality for all content types as affected by Quality of Service (QoS) parameters both in the application and network level. Video streaming is a promising multimedia application and is gaining popularity over wireless/mobile communications. The quality of the video depends heavily on the type of content. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, video sequences are classified into groups representing different content types using cluster analysis based on the spatial (edges) and temporal (movement) feature extraction. Second, we conducted experiments to investigate the impact of packet loss on video contents and hence find the threshold in terms of upper, medium and lower quality boundary at which users’ perception of service quality is acceptable. Finally, to identify the minimum send bitrate to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (e.g. to reach communication quality with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) greater than 3.5) for the different content types over wireless networks. We tested 12 different video clips reflecting different content types. We chose Peak- Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) and decodable frame rate (Q) as end-to-end video quality metrics and MPEG4 as the video codec. From our experiments we found that video contents with high Spatio-Temporal (ST) activity are very sensitive to packet loss compared to those with low ST-activity. Further, content providers usually send video at highest bitrate resulting in over provisioning. Through our experiments we have established that sending video beyond a certain bitrate does not add any value to improving the quality. The work should help optimizing bandwidth allocation for specific content in content delivery networks.